Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4 ■ HTML and JavaScript
Figure 4-12. Depending on JavaScript availability, the user gets a link or a button to send the form
However, the function has one major flaw: it will fail when there are more input elements following the Submit
button. Change the HTML to have another input after the Submit button:
Name:
email:
You will see that the "send" Submit button does not get replaced with a link. This happens because you removed
an input element, which changes the size of the array, and the loop gets out of sync with the elements it should reach.
A fix for this problem is to decrease the loop counter every time you remove an item. However, you need to check
whether the loop is already in the final iteration by comparing the loop counter with the length of the array (simply
decreasing the counter would cause the script to fail, because it tries to access an element that is not there):
function submitToLinks()
{
var inputs,i,newLink,newText;
inputs=document.getElementsByTagName('input');
for (i=0;i